The word enchantment includes within itself the word chant. When we chant, our consciousness shifts into a different set of possibilities from the ones now defining our “normal” experience. When we fall in love—with a mate, a child, or even an idea—a spontaneous enchantment occurs, a blessing that is ours for as long as we are capable of holding onto it. We are bewitched, in those cases, and we are delighted.
Let’s stay with those words: We are bewitched and we are delighted. The witch in each of us, our natural psychic powers, is simply, at those times, allowed to be. There is a suspension of the routine denial of magic that passes for realism in our modern, disenchanted world. The modern mind has been commandeered by alien mental forces, and they have dissuaded us of our magical powers. Today, at the end of the millennium, we are looking for the enchantment we threw away, many of us even suspecting that we cannot survive much longer without it. Told for centuries that enchanted power was merely the stuff of myth and fairy tales, now we are not so sure. Our strict adherence to rationalism has turned out to be less mental sophistication than collective gullibility, and we are ready to consider that what now passes for truth is in many ways fantasy, and what the world calls fantasy includes a lot of truth.
In A Course in Miracles, light is defined as “understanding.” The world as we know it could not stand before the power of a human race that has remembered who we really are and reclaimed our spiritual powers. The investment in our forgetfulness, while in most cases unconscious, is enormous. That is why falling in love, when deep and masterful, is a powerful and revolutionary act. To be delighted is to be awakened. We have been asleep to our spiritual heritage for ages, and our greatest chance of awakening lies in awakening together.
Enchanted romance occurs not in the regions of our worldly thinking, but in another dimension: on the dark side of the moon. Some things are seen more clearly in light, and some things are seen more clearly in darkness. The word occult means “hidden.” Something hidden, in a psychological sense, is not negative but merely mysterious, neither seen by the physical eye nor obvious to the rational mind. God created both day and night. What is hidden during the day is often magical at night. The dark side of the moon is still a part of the moon.
If we want enchantment in our daily lives, we must cultivate its spiritual conditions. We must learn to give and to receive, to appreciate joy and give it to others, to see the magic in ordinary things, and seize the moment like the key to love that it is. Most people, when they first fall in love, are willing enough to fly, to be poetic, to grab the golden ring of infinite possibility. Yet how quickly then, having thus expanded, they constrict again to fit the littleness of the disenchanted world. They prefer dry prose to poetry, and dry prose is death to love. Back on earth after a flight through the sky, the coward at love chooses not to rock the boat of practicality and routine. Little does the coward know that the boat itself is sinking.
The dark side of the moon is not the enemy of sunlight but its esoteric twin. It is the dance floor of an illumined mind. Psychological analysis can never quite pin down its power (Goethe once said, “To analyze is to murder”), for it evades the arrogance of the conscious mind. With our rational understanding we can fly a man to the moon, but getting love to fly can be a harder job. It doesn’t respond to our ego-based assumptions, and there is no scientific formula that can conjure it up or make it soar. Love is a mystery that cannot be approached through will; it responds most generously to humbled souls. In some unexplainable way, it seems to grace us when it’s ready. Our greatest tool for bringing love into our lives is to pray, “Dear God, please prepare me. Open me up and make me new. Destroy the walls that surround my heart.”
I don’t know if we can hold onto this, you said.
Why couldn’t we? I asked. I could see you slipping back, and it scared me.
We can’t be this way, and pay the bills. We can’t be this way, and stay responsible. We can’t be this way, and . . . I don’t know. I just don’t think we can be this way.
Then you can’t. But I can.
And then I swam away. . . .
Romance is one of the sacred temples that dot the landscape of a human life. It is transformative and healing when approached with reverence, but always potentially dangerous when approached with anything less. We tend to lack humility toward love, to patronize it rather than bow before it, to put mundane considerations before the emotional need to hold someone in our arms. And then we complain because life is so boring. What a price most of us have already paid for our shallowness in the face of love.
Like a castle surrounded by a deep, impenetrable forest, an enchanted love is as forbidding as it is inviting. The forest is full of magical dragons that assault the casual passerby. Not just anybody gets to stroll through the castle gates, play around inside the courtyard, and get out of there alive. It takes a prince to make his way through the forest and deal with all those dragons. Then, even if he has the cojones to do that, he needs to find the sleeping princess and kiss her so perfectly that she actually wakes up. That he can only do if his sword and shield are with him. Otherwise, the dragons of love will chew him up and spit him out, and the princess will grieve that, one more time, someone tried but could not rescue her.
That is where most of us—princes and princesses alike—usually are, when we wander into the therapist’s office or support group, looking for comfort after doing some time in the battlefields of love. Millions of us, like naïve soldiers singing songs at the beginning of a war, thinking this was going to be easy enough and then coming home in body bags—that is our psychic history of love. We then sit at the feet of friends and counselors, weeping and moaning, what did I do wrong? No one had told us we needed a sword. No one mentioned we would need a shield. And no one had taught us the mystical basics. We hadn’t really known that there were any.
Love is a hero’s journey, and the hero’s journey is a noble but difficult path. Recognizing this, and honoring it as such, endows romantic love with the grandeur and power it deserves. An overly casual mind might attract love easily enough, but lacks the emotional musculature necessary to maintain it. Love is a daytime as well as a nighttime activity, and it demands that we become creatures of both. Every part of who we are is brought up for review, that we might let go what is heavy and low within us, and claim what is light and high. Romance then becomes a spiritual missile, taking us from where we’ve been to where we need to go.
Where have we been? In darkness. Where are we going? To the land of the sun. Intimacy reaches now for its sacred element, bringing hearts together to form forcefields of light bright enough to cast out the darkness of the world. The entire human race is now crossing from one realm into another, and relationship is one of our modes of crossing, carrying us across the waters of consciousness to the land that lies beyond.
There is no way to make that journey without divine illumination to light our way. There is a holy relevance to love’s deeper enchantments, giving meaning to its joy and also to its pain. Sacred understanding holds our hearts together, supporting us as we support each other in climbing the stairs to our higher selves. It is our medicine when the heart is breaking, feeling that the labor we are in, trying to birth our own souls, is far too hard and we will die if we go on. Invisible forces minister to us during our transfiguration from self to Self. Love comes to slay what needs to be slain in us, in order for something new to emerge. It is hard to go through this, to surrender deeply to the waters of intimate romance, to wield its power and endure its pain, without a sense of God’s love moving through us in the process.
God gives us new eyes, new ears, new hearts, and new minds. And we need them if we are to learn to truly love. The body’s eyes show us wonderful things, from paintings to bodies to children to nature. But they are also vulnerable to the tricks of maya, the ghostly dance which makes up the kaleidoscope of the physical world. Another world, to which God delivers us, awaits us on the other side of our illusions. Enchanted love will take
us there.
When love is fun, it is sublime. When it hurts, it is excruciating. When it is true, it is enduring. When it is enchanted, it is miraculous. That realm is now beckoning the entire world, and enchanted lovers, with a newly wise and innocent look in their eyes, are both heralding its existence and announcing its address.
Your eyes are like street lamps to me. They tell me I am home, this is where I live, I am safe here, I have made it. There is someone waiting here to talk to me and hold me. . . . I want to know everything, and I am rushing now across the grass, to throw open the door, to say “I’m home!”, to see your eyes, to know that this is the right address, the right address at last, thank God.
Romance is an emotional and sexual shadow dance, performed by our truer selves behind a spiritual veil. This veil is not illusion but a gossamer reality. Within that reality we are all afloat in a liquid amniotic spirit, preparing to be born anew.
The art of love is an emotional midwifery. We hold each other as we emerge together into the light of a new life, both exhilarating and terrifying. The monster can get very loud within us, as the rattle of death overtakes it. Just at the point where the beast is about to turn into beauty, a cowardly, uninitiated partner might say, “This is too high maintenance. I can’t do this. I’m leaving.”
We find a whole new dimension of “for better or for worse.” The light of love is bound to shine on the creepy, crawly aspects of ourselves, those pieces of former brokenness lying hidden beneath the rocks within. Inside the tomb lie our dormant energies, our passion and our love, seemingly dead but only sleeping; love is come to remove the rock, heralding the resurrection of sanity and Self.
The first one to see the resurrected Jesus on the road was Mary Magdalene. Her eyes were the most attuned of anyone’s to the sight of His luminous Self. Not his mother. Not his disciples. Not his followers. Her. She saw him first because she was in love with him. Indeed, some believe she was his wife. For two thousand years, their story has been psychically sealed, our collective mind not yet ready to behold the mystery of their divine connection. Yet as our romantic consciousness rises, illumined and blessed at a whole new level, their union will become more clear. Who he was to her, and who she was to him, is one of the cosmic hieroglyphs still locked away inside us.
Pieces of their mystery are now becoming clear, as one letter is decoded, then another follows quickly. We are beginning to understand the word Behold. Jesus and Magdalene beheld each other. There is no true being without holding. Until we have learned to hold each other, we haven’t truly learned to be.
To say, “I behold your beauty (or your strength, or your courage, or whatever)” means, “I know that your beauty is there, because I see it even if you don’t yet see it yourself. You are safe to bring it forth in my presence, and when you do, I will hold it like a precious gift. I will receive it with love and honor.” It is not enough for me to see something in you; I must learn to hold what I see. Until we are blessed by the mystic’s love, we wander forever in the living death of our woundedness and pain. Then, in an enchanted moment, we are free of who we used to be: the be-loved be-holds us, and death turns into new life.
They were wicked to me. I know they were. They wanted to kill me. I know they did. They think I’m bad. I know they do.
And you—your eyes are even harder to bear. Do you pity me? No. Do you laugh at me? No. Do you scoff at me? No.
I looked at you.
Now relax, you said. The past is over, and it was just a dream. My love is here with you, and my arms are the door. Just be with me now. There is nothing else.
From ancient Egypt, there emerged one of the greatest love stories in the world: the romance between the goddess Isis and her brother Osiris. When their wicked brother Seth killed Osiris in a jealous rage, Isis drew upon her mystical power, the strength of her divine love, to bring Osiris back from the dead. That is the power inherent in love: to awaken the beloved from the state of the psychically dead. On the night of their reunion, celebrating the resurrection of their romance, Isis and Osiris made love and conceived a wondrous child.
Seth, as one would imagine, went bonkers. “Now,” he thought, “I must kill Osiris again, yet this time I will chop him up into many pieces, so that my sister will never be able to put him back together again.”
Then Seth murdered Osiris again, this time dismembering him and scattering the pieces of his brother’s body throughout the various regions of Egypt. Only Osiris’ penis (it’s interesting to note) went elsewhere, swallowed by an alligator and sunk to the bottom of the Nile.
Time fulfilled itself and Isis gave birth, now holding in her arms the divine child Horus. Seth, still on a rampage, sought to kill them both. Worried that their traveling together made the child an easier target, Isis sought a surrogate mother to take care of her son. Yet not just any woman would do: only a Goddess could provide divine milk with which to suckle a holy child.
So it was that Isis sought out the Goddess Hathor, begging her to take the baby Horus and raise him as her own. Visually, Hathor would forevermore be pictured as a woman with a cow’s ears, the Goddess who provided mother’s milk to the divine baby Horus.
And something very interesting happened when Horus grew into manhood, in a drama quite different from what the Western mind is used to. When he matured, Horus did not separate from Hathor. He did not seek another woman for his bride. Rather, Hathor herself transformed. Having acted as his mother, she now became his wife. She was the same woman, honored for the various parts of herself. No split between Mary and Magdalene here, no mother and whore dichotomy, no shameful introduction of guilt onto sex, or onto women. The Goddess retained all her many faces, from maternal to erotic to divine. Neither Goddess self nor sexual self nor mother self were diminished by the presence of the others.
The Egyptian temple of Hathor is, for me as a woman, the most powerful sacred site in the world. We find the force of Hathor there in her vast feminine glory, resplendent in her power to raise up both men and women from the depths of our brokenness and littleness and shame. There have been women in the modern age who reflected Hathor’s magic. Jacqueline Onassis and Princess Diana both come to mind, their motherhood and sexuality not opposed, but playing off each other like the colors in mother-of-pearl. Neither one desexed herself in order to be a “good mother,” nor did she ever play down her motherhood in order to remain an object of sexual glamour. Both fused the two so easily that one has to remind oneself that, before them, motherhood had come to mean, for generations of American women at least, less sexy hair, less sexy clothes, less sexy self. And, in addition to sexual glamour and an almost fierce devotion to their children, both women held almost an other-worldly sway over the hearts and minds of millions.
Hathor did not have to make a choice between essential aspects of her total self, and neither should mere mortals. For none of us are mere mortals. The gods and goddesses are alive in all of us, to the extent to which we are alive in them.
Sex, mysticism, and motherhood form a feminine trinity. A trinity represents mystical union among three pieces of the universe that should not be kept apart. In both men and women, the separation of essential aspects of our humanity is the cornerstone of the fallen self, the pieces of the murdered Osiris new strewn throughout the land. There could hardly be a more dramatic image of the separation of sex from self than the swallowing of a man’s penis by an alligator! Osiris was literally dismembered, his penis not even remaining aboveground, but rather sunk to muddy depths at the bottom of the subconscious mind. And does it not remain there to this day?
Then you and I, adult children of a spiritually barbaric century, come breezing along, looking for love and expecting it to be easy. Ha! Nothing misunderstood is easy. Nothing that is not naked blesses. Nothing superficial heals.
Isis and Osiris and Horus—and Seth as well, I’m afraid—all live within us. The feminine in each of us is Isis, breathing love into her deadened other half. The masculine in each of us is Osiris, nob
le and brave, yet torn apart by attacks from a jealous world. The fear-based ego in each of us is Seth, set out to destroy the experience of powerful, total, authentic love. The highest potential in each of us is Horus, set to reclaim humanity’s divine identity, suckled by a divine mother, married to a divine Goddess, first pharaoh in the psychic land of the Gods.
It is the role of Horus to “re-member” his father—to bring back together the pieces of the lost and broken god-self within us. Horus is the fully actualized self, born of divine parents, living a life of unity and integrity, here to rule and harmonize the forces of the universe. At every stage of his life, there is a woman there to support and nourish him, and he has no problem letting one woman play all the parts.
In sacred temples throughout Egypt, priceless sculpture and painting created by ancient artisans in honor of their gods were viciously defaced by early Christians. All visual representations of a God other than Jesus Christ were deemed sacrilegious, to be violently hacked away by fanatical Coptics during the early centuries of the first millennium. But nowhere is the hacking more brutal or more vicious than at the Temple of Hathor. She was barely allowed to remain within her temple space at all. Her defacement there is so pronounced, so anti-woman, so violently destructive of any feminine aspect of God, that any sensitive person approaching this place is automatically plunged into the horror of female crucifixion. That crucifixion has been continuous—from Hathor’s Temple to medieval witch-burnings to the emotional wounds within us still. We are crucified not by men but by spiritual ignorance. It is an ignorance borne of outright terror of the forces of love on the dark side of the moon.
But wait, I said. How do I know that if I go with you, I will be okay, and I’ll function, and I’ll survive?
Enchanted Love Page 3
